Another day, another Hitler parody video. This one (courtesy of http://criticalcommons.org) is a rant about the rise of digital scholarship – a subjet I cherish and occasionally deal with in my seminar. The German dictator, now reborn as a grotesque Internet meme, highlights the existing cultural divide between the up-and-coming Internet-savvy “junior” scholars and the ageing generation of paper-intensive, book-prone professors and researchers. Bitterly, he claims academic teaching is “a dying profession” (why he’s not the only one: check here and here).

“We were great once”, cries Hitler, voicing the disappointment of old time academics. “A proud institution. We controlled knowledge: we told everyone what and how to think. Now (…) we spend our time propping up our fading legitimacy”.